Hepatology Research

Author Guidelines

AIMS AND SCOPEHepatology Research (formerly International Hepatology Communications) is the official journal of the Japan Society of Hepatology, and publishes original articles, reviews and short communications dealing with hepatology. Reviews or mini-reviews are especially welcomed from those areas within hepatology undergoing rapid changes. Rapid communications should contain concise definitive information.

EDITORIAL REVIEW AND ACCEPTANCE The acceptance criteria for all papers are the quality and originality of the research and its significance to our readership. Except where otherwise stated, manuscripts are peer reviewed by two anonymous reviewers and the Editor. Final acceptance or rejection rests with the Editorial Board, who reserves the right to refuse any material for publication.

Please submit, with the manuscript, the names and addresses of three potential referees. You may also mention persons who you would prefer not to review your paper. The choice of reviewers remains the Editor’s prerogative.

Manuscripts should be written so that they are intelligible to the professional reader who is not a specialist in the particular field. They should be written in a clear, concise, direct style. Where contributions are judged as acceptable for publication on the basis of scientific content, the Editor and the Publisher reserve the right to modify typescripts to eliminate ambiguity and repetition and improve communication between author and reader. If extensive alterations are required, the manuscript will be returned to the author for revision.

Revised manuscripts should be returned to the Editorial Office within 60 days for minor revision or 120 days major revision. After this period, the article will be regarded as a new submission and assigned a new date of receipt.

It is the policy of this journal that the Editor’s decision on manuscripts submitted to Hepatology Research is final. Resubmitted manuscripts after a reject decision will not be considered.

ELECTRONIC SUBMISSION OF MANUSCRIPTS Manuscripts should be submitted online at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/hepres. Authors must supply an email address as all correspondence will be by email. Two files should be supplied: the covering letter and the manuscript (in Word or rich text format (.rtf)). The covering letter should be uploaded as a file not for review.

All articles submitted to the Journal must comply with these instructions. Failure to do so will result in return of the manuscript and possible delay in publication. • Submissions should be double-spaced. • All margins should be at least 30 mm. • All pages should be numbered consecutively in the top right-hand corner, beginning with the title page. • Do not use Enter at the end of lines within a paragraph. • Turn the hyphenation option off; include only those hyphens that are essential to the meaning. • Specify any special characters used to represent non-keyboard characters. • Take care not to use l (ell) for 1 (one), O (capital o) for 0 (zero) or ß (German esszett) for Greek beta. • Use a tab, not spaces, to separate data points in tables. If you use a table editor function, ensure that each data point is contained within a unique cell (i.e. do not use carriage returns within cells).

Each figure should be supplied as a separate file, with the figure number incorporated in the file name. Files saved as .ppt are not acceptable at any stage. For submission, low-resolution figures saved as .jpg or .bmp files should be uploaded, for ease of transmission during the review process. Upon acceptance of the article, high-resolution figures (at least 300 d.p.i.) saved as .eps or .tif files should be uploaded. Digital images supplied only as low-resolution files cannot be used.

Further instructions are available at the submission site.

Covering letter Papers are accepted for publication in the Journal on the understanding that the content has not been published or submitted for publication elsewhere except as a brief abstract in the proceedings of a scientific meeting or symposium. This must be stated in the covering letter.

The covering letter must also contain an acknowledgment that all authors have contributed significantly, and that all authors are in agreement with the content of the manuscript. In keeping with the latest guidelines of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, each author’s contribution to the paper is to be quantified.

If tables or figures have been reproduced from another source, a letter from the copyright holder (usually the Publisher), stating authorization to reproduce the material, must be attached to the covering letter.

Author material archive policyAuthors who require the return of any submitted material that is accepted for publication should inform the Editorial Office after acceptance. If no indication is given that author material should be returned, Wiley Blackwell will dispose of all hardcopy and electronic material two months after publication.

ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS Authors must state that the protocol for the research project has been approved by a suitably constituted Ethics Committee of the institution within which the work was undertaken and that it conforms to the provisions of the Declaration of Helsinki (as revised in Seoul, Korea, October 2008) available at http://www.wma.net/en/30publications/10policies/b3/index.html.

Any experiments involving animals must be demonstrated to be ethically acceptable and where relevant conform to national guidelines for animal usage in research.

COPYRIGHT, LICENSING and ONLINE OPEN Accepted papers will be passed to Wiley’s production team for publication. The author identified as the formal corresponding author for the paper will receive an email prompting them to login into Wiley’s Author Services, where via the Wiley Author Licensing Service (WALS) they will be asked to complete an electronic license agreement on behalf of all authors on the paper.

FAQs about the terms and conditions of the standard copyright transfer agreements (CTA) in place for the journal, including terms regarding archiving of the accepted version of the paper, are available at: CTA Terms and Conditions FAQs

OnlineOpen – ‘Gold road’ Open Access

OnlineOpen is available to authors of articles who wish to make their article freely available to all on Wiley Online Library under a Creative Commons licence. In addition, authors of OnlineOpen articles are permitted to post the final, published PDF of their article on a website, institutional repository or other free public server, immediately on publication. With OnlineOpen the author, the author's funding agency, or the author's institution pays a fee to ensure that the article is made open access, known as ‘gold road’ open access.

For more information about the OnlineOpen license terms and conditions click here.

STYLE OF THE MANUSCRIPTManuscripts should follow the style of the Vancouver agreement detailed in the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors’ revised ‘Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals: Writing and Editing for Biomedical Publication’, as presented at http://www.ICMJE.org/.

Spelling. The Journal uses US spelling and authors should therefore follow the latest edition of the Merriam–Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary.

Units. All measurements must be given in SI or SI-derived units. Please go to the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures (BIPM) website at http://www.bipm.fr for more information about SI units.

Abbreviations. Abbreviations should be used sparingly – only where they ease the reader’s task by reducing repetition of long, technical terms. Initially use the word in full, followed by the abbreviation in parentheses. Thereafter use the abbreviation only.

Trade names. Chemical substances should be referred to by the generic name only. Trade names should not used. Drugs should be referred to by their generic names. If proprietary drugs have been used in the study, refer to these by their generic name, mentioning the proprietary name, and the name and location of the manufacturer, in parentheses.

Genetic nomenclature. Standard genetic nomenclature should be used. For further information, including relevant websites, authors should refer to the genetic nomenclature guide in Trends in Genetics (Elsevier Science, 1998).

Nucleotide sequence data can be submitted in electronic form to any of the three major collaborative databases: DDBJ, EMBL or GenBank. It is only necessary to submit to one database as data are exchanged between DDBJ, EMBL and GenBank on a daily basis. The suggested wording for referring to accession-number information is: ‘These sequence data have been submitted to the DDBJ/EMBL/GenBank databases under accession number U12345.’ Addresses are as follows: DNA Data Bank of Japan (DDBJ) http://www.ddbj.nig.ac.jp EMBL Nucleotide Sequence Submissions http://www.ebi.ac.uk GenBank http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

PARTS OF THE MANUSCRIPTThe journal publishes papers dealing with hepatology in the following categories (word limits include text and references, but not tables or figures). Case reports will be accepted only if they contain very important new information. • Review Article: Up to 5,000 words (including References) and a maximum of 4 authors. The number of tables/figures is not limited. • Original Article: Up to 4,000 words (excluding References). The number of tables/figures is not limited. • Short Communication: Up to 2,000 words (excluding References) and up to four tables/figures in total. • Case Report: Up to 2,000 words (excluding References) and up to four tables/figures in total. • Letter to the Editor: Up to 500 words and up to 10 references with one table/figure in total; no abstract. • Editorial: Up to 1,500 words (including References) and a maximum of 1 author only; no abstract.

Manuscripts should be presented in the following order: (i) title page, (ii) abstract and key words, (iii) text, (iv) acknowledgments, (v) references, (vi) appendices, (vii) figure legends, (viii) tables (each table complete with title and footnotes) and (ix) figures. Footnotes to the text are not allowed and any such material should be incorporated into the text as parenthetical matter.

Title pageThe title page should contain (i) the title of the paper, (ii) the full names of the authors and (iii) the addresses of the institutions at which the work was carried out together with (iv) the full postal and email address, plus facsimile and telephone numbers, of the author to whom correspondence about the manuscript should be sent. The present address of any author, if different from that where the work was carried out, should be supplied in a footnote.

The title should be short, informative and contain the major key words. Do not use abbreviations in the title. A short running title (less than 50 characters including spaces) should also be provided.

Abstract and key words All articles must have a structured abstract that states in 250 words or fewer the purpose, basic procedures, main findings and principal conclusions of the study. Divide the abstract with the headings: Aim, Methods, Results, Conclusions.

A maximum of six key words, for the purposes of indexing, should be supplied below the abstract, in alphabetical order, and should be taken from those recommended by the US National Library of Medicine’s Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) browser list at http://www.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/meshhome.html.

Text Authors should use the following subheadings to divide the sections of their manuscript: Introduction, Methods, Results and Discussion.

Acknowledgments The source of financial grants and other funding must be acknowledged, including a frank declaration of the authors’ industrial links and affiliations. The contribution of colleagues or institutions should also be acknowledged. Personal thanks and thanks to anonymous reviewers are not appropriate.

ReferencesThe Vancouver system of referencing should be used (examples are given below). In the text, references should be cited using superscript Arabic numerals in the order in which they appear. If cited in tables or figure legends, number according to the first identification of the table or figure in the text.

In the reference list, cite the names of all authors when there are six or fewer; when seven or more, list the first three followed by et al. Do not use ibid. or op cit. Reference to unpublished data and personal communications should not appear in the list but should be cited in the text only (e.g. Smith A, 2000, unpublished data). All citations mentioned in the text, tables or figures must be listed in the reference list.

Names of journals should be abbreviated according to the Serial Sources for the Biosis Data Base, available in most libraries or from http://www.biosis.org. Authors are responsible for the accuracy of the references.

World Wide Web 3 Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Preparing for Emergencies: A Guide for People on Dialysis. Available at: http://www.medicare.gov/Publications/Pubs/pdf/10150.pdf. Accessed January 13, 2004.

Appendices These should be placed at the end of the paper, numbered in Roman numerals and referred to in the text. If written by a person other than the author of the main text, the writer’s name should be included below the title. Extensive sets of data, such as large tables or long appendices, may be classed as Supplementary Material. Author guidelines for supplementary material can be found at http://authorservices.wiley.com/bauthor/suppmat.asp

TablesTables should be self-contained and complement, but not duplicate, information contained in the text. Number tables consecutively in the text in Arabic numerals. Type tables on a separate page with the legend above. Legends should be concise but comprehensive – the table, legend and footnotes must be understandable without reference to the text. Vertical lines should not be used to separate columns. Column headings should be brief, with units of measurement in parentheses; all abbreviations must be defined in footnotes. Footnote symbols: †, ‡, §, ¶, should be used (in that order) and *, **, *** should be reserved for P-values. Statistical measures such as SD or SEM should be identified in the headings.

Figures All illustrations (line drawings and photographs) are classified as figures. Figures should be cited in consecutive order in the text. Figures should be sized to fit within the column (80.5 mm), intermediate (110 mm) or the full text width (168 mm). Magnifications should be indicated using a scale bar on the illustration.

Line figures should be sharp, black and white graphs or diagrams, drawn professionally or with a computer graphics package. Lettering must be included and should be sized to be no larger than the journal text.

For colour reproduction in print you will receive information regarding the costs from Wiley Blackwell upon receipt of your accepted article. Even if you do not wish to pay for colour figure reproduction in print if you supply colour figures they will be published in colour on the Web at no charge. Figure legends. Type figure legends on a separate page. Legends should be concise but comprehensive – the figure and its legend must be understandable without reference to the text. Include definitions of any symbols used and define/explain all abbreviations and units of measurement.

PROOFS It is essential that corresponding authors supply an email address to which correspondence can be emailed while their article is in production. Word files of edited articles will be sent for checking via email, and should be returned to the Publisher. It is essential that these files are checked carefully, as the cost of changes made at a later stage may be charged to the author. Full instructions on how to correct and return the file will be attached to the email.

Notification of the URL from where to download a Portable Document Format (PDF) typeset page proof, associated forms and further instructions will be sent by email to the corresponding author. The purpose of the PDF proof is a final check of the layout, and of tables and figures. Alterations other than the essential correction of errors are unacceptable at PDF proof stage. The proof should be checked, and approval to publish the article should be emailed to the Publisher by the date indicated, otherwise, it may be signed off on by the Editor or held over to the next issue.

OFFPRINTS A free PDF offprint will be supplied to the corresponding author. A minimum of 50 additional offprints will be provided upon request, at the author’s expense. These paper offprints may be ordered online. Please visit http://offprint.cosprinters.com/, fill in the necessary details and ensure that you type information in all of the required fields.

ACCEPTED ARTICLESHepatology Researchoffers Accepted Articles for selected articles. Accepted Articles is a Wiley Blackwell service whereby peer-reviewed accepted articles are published online prior to their ultimate inclusion in a print or online issue. Articles published within Accepted Articles have been fully refereed, but have not been through the copy-editing, typesetting and proof correction process.

EARLYVIEWHepatology Research is covered by Wiley Blackwell’s EarlyView service. EarlyView articles are complete full-text articles published online in advance of their publication in a printed issue. Articles are therefore available as soon as they are ready, rather than having to wait for the next scheduled print issue. EarlyView articles are complete and final. They have been fully reviewed, revised and edited for publication, and the authors’ final corrections have been incorporated. Because they are in final form, no changes can be made after online publication. The nature of EarlyView articles means that they do not yet have volume, issue or page numbers, so EarlyView articles cannot be cited in the traditional way. They are therefore given a Digital Object Identifier (DOI), which allows the article to be cited and tracked before it is allocated to an issue. After print publication, the DOI remains valid and can continue to be used to cite and access the article. More information about DOIs can be found at http://www.doi.org/faq.html.